Edible Apple

It’s always interesting to hear what first time Mac users think of the Apple experience, and to that end, we have Steve from BadCheese.com who recently detailed his impressions as a Linux guy using a Mac for the very first time.

Friday night, first impressions: Nice hardware. Beautiful screen. Clean fonts. Nice, quiet keyboard. I liked the initial ‘take a picture for your profile’ which uses the screen as a flash – nice touch. I found more wireless access points from my home living room than I’ve ever found using any laptop that I’ve ever used before. Nice wireless/antenna. I changed the battery to the most conservative option and I got > 3 hours of battery life from it the first night. Nice. The magnetic power connector is also a nice touch. I had known about that before, but using it several times was nice. Pretty, well-engineered, productive and useful right out of the box. Good job Jobs! 🙂

Saturday night, I mainly tried out the software that came with the OS. I poked around with things and got to know how good safari was and ichat, mail, etc … Some initial impressions: iTunes is *way* faster on a mac than on windows. Javascript on Safari is very zippy! Finding things on a mac is not easy for a Linux or Windows user. Finding installed applications could be made easier in my opinion. Time capsule is a great feature. Rock band is fun. I think that I would like to buy parallels or something so I could dual-boot with it though. I liked that the VOIP client just worked out of the box and was very easy to set up and configure.

I began to miss my > 1 mouse buttons. I tried holding the mouse button down, I tried double-clicking, I tried everything and had to figure out the mac-way of doing things without a second or third mouse button. I’m sure that I could hook up an external USB mouse, but I wanted to do things the ‘mac’ way, so I worked without it. Also, I’m used to tapping the touchpad for a left-click. I dont know how many times I tried that and waited for something to happen … 🙂

You can check out Steve’s full report on his first ever Mac experience over here.